Behind the scenes with Captain Polo: the floating vegetable gardens of Bangladesh

by | Mar 19, 2020

We are living a period of critical, immediate crisis superimposed on a far longer period of escalating, gradual crisis. Coronavirus is paralyzing human activities across a world that is already critically ill from human-induced climate change.

I believe humanity is threatening its very survival; this may be the ultimate test, the final battle. Of course I am not referring to coronavirus, but to global warming.

Yet the coronavirus is teaching us important lessons about ourselves and about Nature: people across the world are finding creative ways to support each other, to find solutions to curb the spread of the virus. People everywhere have stopped moving around, the world has gone quiet. I hear there are dolphins reappearing in the canals of Venice, where the water has regained its transparency thanks to the lack of human disturbance.

This teaches us 2 things: 1) People solve very serious problems by being creative; 2) Nature is extraordinarily resilient.

If humanity gets creative about solving the broader, far more consequential crisis of global warming, humanity will live on, stronger, healthier and wiser than ever before, and Nature will bounce back.

This week’s Author Insight from The Adventures of Polo the Bear is about human creativity in times of crisis.

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